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Sin City, Studio Ghibli,

Woo Hoo! Everybody loves Sin City.

Can’t wait. Though it’s going to be some time before it releases in India. I am still undecided about whether to go the Kill Bill way and shed picture quality in favour of an early peek ( courtesy The Market ), or wait for the theatrical release in India. Probably it will be the former, because I can’t imagine it being screened uncut. Humph.

For non-comic-book readers who have no clue about what on earth Sin City is, here’s the primer.

Prices of the Sin City comics, the original 32-page floppies that were released between 1991 and ’98, have soared on eBay. I remember seeing complete lots of the Sin City comics going for 80$ a year ago ( I bought the individual issues at below cover-price, my first 2fargon-assisted eBay purchases. Did I tell you about the Frank Miller-autographed issue of Sin City: To Hell And Back #1he got for me? ). Last I looked, complete lots are selling at about 300$. Man.

Oh, and porcorosso, I finally watched Porco Rosso last night. I have a vague feeling that the Great Ghibli Gig has just begun.

Before I go to sleep in the middle of the night, I put on the computer, and enqueue all the music files on the hard disk (the playlist time comes to about 312 days) on Winamp, put it on low volume. It’s an awesome feeling waking up in the middle of the night ( for a glass of water, or to pee, or just like that) and listening to the song that’s playing at the moment and trying to figure out who it is by. I put Winamp in shuffle mode, so when I go back to sleep – it’s fun guessing what the next song would be.

It might sound funny, but I can’t sleep with the sound of running water, or a clock ticking louder than normal – but heavy metal playing loud is no problem at all.

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There was this song tune that popped up in my head yesterday morning and kept starting up at very inopportune moments. How irritating it is to have a tune bouncing around in your brain without an anchor! I knew that the voice was a whiny voice and the song sounded like one of those top-20 hits, which meant it could be any band in the whole world.

But I figured out what it was just two minutes ago. It was Greenday’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams, that I heard on VH1 a couple of days ago, while sipping on a cappuccino in JavaCity.

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I am a member of ebay.co.uk. Why? Because when I passed out from college, and joined the company I work in, I found out that ebay.com was a banned site. Mostly because you get adult stuff through the site and the automatic site blocker ensured I could not access it. The catch was that ebay.co.uk was accessible, and I proceeded to sign up, with nothing in mind other than browsing through the comics-listings. Then a year later, I managed to convince the sysadmin about ebay being safe enough, after which he allowed access to it. So I was an ebay.com member.

Today morning in the mail, I get a mail saying “Welcome to ebay India”. Whoa! Baazee is now ebay.in. Heh heh heh. Since I was an ebay.com member, I am, by default, a member of ebay.in too.

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Now that I have seen The Last Temptation of Christ, and been suitably pissed off by a blonde and white Jesus Christ with an American accent (Though Willem Dafoe was good, really good), and followed by American-looking Israelites who used modern-day expressions in their speech while the middle-eastern-looking guys looked on and whispered and gestured to each other, I feel like watching The Passion of the Christ once again. I think the best thing about the movie was the use of Aramaic as the language. I didn’t like it at all the first time I saw it, and I don’t think I will – if only it had a storyline like the Last Temptation, or a soundtrack half as good.

Happiness is – waking up in the morning and listening to the Passion: Soundtrack to The Last Temptation of Christ really loud. On 5.1 speakers.

The Rahman-Passion connection goes deeper. Apart from the familiar bass track of Of These, Hope being copied in Anbae ( Jeans ), there’s also the (unauthorized) use of the main refrain of Baaba Maal’s Morning Prayer, which is a track in Passion: Sources, and appears in the movie as is, when Lazarus is being brought back to life, a very creepy moment. Funnily, the Passion album has a track called Lazarus Raised which does not feature in the movie. A bit from Morning Prayer is used in the One Two Ka Four theme music.

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I just found a copy of Art Spiegelman’s Maus in Blossom Book House. For 250 Rs. I am signing up for membership in al_lude-sir’s anti-Blossom campaign. Er, on second thoughts, will sign on after 5 PM. Right after I go and buy that Moebius-illustrated Ray Bradbury collection that’s available there for a paltry 100 rupees.

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Quizmasterly Tips

How Not To Be A Jerk When Conducting A Quiz, part 1: When you are doing the prelims on powerpoint, NUMBER the bloomin’ slides. Otherwise, when someone asks you in the middle of the round – “Was that question 19 or 20?” and you find yourself fumbling for an answer, much Egg shall drip from your face. Especially when the marauding masses ask the same thing every two minutes (with varying question-numbers).

How Not To Be a Jerk When Conducting a Quiz, part 2: Have a test slide before the powerpoint show with embedded audio and video clips in it, and play them before the quiz begins. That way, you will know, when you click on a slide and find out that the bloomin’ audio clip does not play, whether the problem lies with the audio cable, or your moronic miscopying of the folders from the CD. And you will have an idea of the volume levels.

How Not To Be a Jerk After the Quiz is Over, part 1: REMEMBER THE QUESTIONS YOU ASKED, DIMWIT!!!!! Not just the answers, THE QUESTIONS. Because there might be a chance that the quizmaster the next day might ask a semi-mutilated version of the SAME QUESTION YOU ASKED yesterday, and you might be the only person in the auditorium not writing down the correct answer. Faugh!

p.s: Remember my experiences about asking a question onstage and then forgetting the answer? At least that didn’t happen this time. Whew.

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